For the Love of Horror April ‘26 Part 1

Horror movie convention For the Love of Horror has landed back in Manchester. It’s Saturday 18th April and I’m looking forward to meeting a Commando actor (someone from the movie, not someone who left their underwear at the hotel). I’m going to try and get a few more photos, and hear what people have to say about their film careers. But first… let’s take a look around Bowlers Exhibition Centre. 

The first Q+A Panel: 78-year-old Ken Foree, Peter from Dawn of the Dead (1978), who tells us he has “talents like Ernest Hemingway.” He tells us of his days of acting and writing. 

 

“Have you ever tried to get something published? If you haven’t, I’ll tell you: I was between acting jobs, coaching basketball, little kids. I like to see the lightbulb come on. One of the kids’ dads said ‘let’s write a low budget action film.’ He’s in New Jersey, I’m in California. I had execs come by, they saw it on a coffee table. They said, who wrote this? I said, I’m not the writer. They said, you’re the writer. They pestered me for a call for months. I said okay. What about my family? A month later, the response has been tremendous at this late time in my life. This was about 10 years ago. You know Taxi? There was a series I wrote, ‘Limo 8.’ It was mine, but the same story. I wrote a horror story, called ‘Shadows.’ That got the same response. My 2 leads were in World War II. They were sending the letters. I wanted you to feel sorry for a serial killer character. But, as you know, everyone has challenges in life. I had things going on with family members. I said to my agent, ‘I’ll call you when I’m ready. Don’t call me.’ After turning down 15-20 projects in 20 years, now I’m overwhelmed. I’ve got loads. I’m ‘back.’” 

COMPARE: There’s a lot of diversity in your career. Drama, horror, comedy. In Rob Zombie’s Halloween, do you bring fun? 

KF: Not always. Joe Grizzly (Foree’s character in Halloween) was the most fun. There were 2 young lads in here today who said, ‘That’s Kenan and Kel’s Mr Rothmore!’ The mic is handed out to the audience queue. 

AUDIENCE QUESTION: In Dawn of the Dead, the zombies are slow. These days in films, they’re fast. What do you prefer? 

KF: The one where I’m paid! Rob Zombie has great way with words. I don’t have a favourite character or speed. I like a piece of this, a style of directing there. 

AQ: What was it like filming the fight scene with Tyler Mane? (In the ‘07 Halloween remake.) 

KF: I met Rob Zombie, I said Yeah, I’ll do Devil’s Rejects. I had food with Tyler Mane. Everything was real. We tore up the wall, rebuilt the wall, beat the shit out of that too. Tyler is a very nice gent. 

AQ: What was the most memorable moment on Dawn of the Dead? 

KF: It was an adventure every time we put on the costumes. The entire film. There was something every night. To round off, Foree gives us some insight into what to expect next. 

KF: Max Brooks is Mel Brooks’ son. We were having lunch in the US with a music artist. We had lunch every couple of months. We’d have a great time talking. Max did World War Z. He asked, ‘did you write anything on zombies?’ I said, ‘yes, but it was too expensive.’ I sat there, I said, ‘pass me the paper.’ He said, ‘you have to have the zombie thing as a comic book.’ Max thanked me through that. You’ll know more as soon as we have a distributor. 

Next to stage: Mekhi Pfifer, Future in Eminem vehicle 8 Mile, and Tyrell Martin in 90s horror I know What you Did Last Summer. He was also Dr Gregory Pratt in medical drama ER. 

  

MP: ER was fast-paced, dealing with other doctors and patients. I try and stay as fit as possible so I can enjoy doing these projects. ER was first for me in TV. We really forged a family atmosphere. We had each other’s backs and had vacations together. We’d spend 14 hrs a day, then go to Lake Tahoe to get food. Everyone was wonderful. 

MP: Filming in 90s, I was doing soundtracks when I got the offer to do the music with Brandy and Monica (The titular ‘boy’ in The Boy is Mine.) 30 years later it’s still embedded in people’s memory. 

AQ: What was it like filming (Dr Who spin-off) Torchwood in Wales? 

MP: It was cold as hell on the beach. It was supposed to be summer, so we had no coats on. It was the coldest I’d ever been. I had no idea John Barrowman was as talented as he is. 

AQ: in 8 Mile, who was the biggest joker? 

MP: We were all in our 20s. Most people it was our first big movie. Eminem was the biggest joker. He was shy when you first met him. 

AQ: Who would you most want to fight on film? 

MP: I always wanted to fight Freddy or Jason. 

CMPR: Who would you avoid? 

MP: Hellraiser’s Pinhead. How’s he walking around with pins in his head?! 

AQ: How would you survive the zombie apocalypse? 

MP: I’d need a stocked freezer, dried food, weapons, and it takes a little community with doctors and engineers. 

AQ: What was Eminem like? 

MP: Eminem had 3 trailers: a movie trailer, a gym trailer for working out, and a music trailer. He said, ‘I want you to listen to this track.’ Nobody knew Lose Yourself was going to be as big as it was, but it shows we bonded. When it came to the rap battle, director Curtis Hanson, RIP, he was not of the hip hop scene at all; he was a beach bum. He rolled around in a jeep with the top down. He let us have carte blanche. We had a great time. 

Mekhi Phifer

 

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Next to the stage: David Patrick Kelly, Sully the henchman in Commando representing the mercenaries who have taken Arnold Schwarzenegger’s daughter. He also played Luther in The Warriors, T-Bird in The Crow, Howie in K-Pax, Jerry in Twin Peaks and Charlie in John Wick.

COMPARE: Every good guy needs a villain. How did you bring intensity to bad guys? 

DPK: There were a group of guys working for Nixon. They ended up on the run, but they were mercenaries. What drove them was money. 

COMPARE: What was your journey into performance? 

DPK: I was a busker, playing songs. The Beatles came, and played in my hometown (Detroit Michigan). They came after the Kennedy assassination, and they were so joyful, a good break. 

COMPARE: What was your first break? 

DPK: I was in the musical Hair, on Broadway. I played guitar because of The Beatles. I like to say I’m a precursor to psychedelic music. 

COMPARE: Let’s talk The Warriors. These days it’s still such a cultural phenomenon. Were you aware when filming? 

DPK: No. Do you have drive in movies? 

COMPARE: No. It rains too much. 

DPK: It became this cultural phenomenon to see people on screen. The issues were really important in The Warriors, which was my first film. (Director) Walter Hill calls everything ‘a western.’ A queue forms for the audience questions. I’m second in line. 

AQ: What was David Lynch like to work with? (Kelly worked with Lynch on Twin Peaks.) 

DPK: David was magical; so revolutionary. The script was like a song. I got a feeling; I knew at the time. I was filming Wild at Heart. He gave me the script. It was something special. You don’t normally see a director leave the camera on a drawing. But you’ve got to remember, Lynch was a painter before he switched to film. 

COMPARE: This guy’s come prepared. He’s got a notebook! 

ME: What was it like being dangled off a bridge by Arnold Schwarzenegger? 

COMPARE: That’s what we all wanna know! 

DPK: I was attached to a crane by my ankle, like in the cowboys and Indians movies. I was up there for 5 hours! It’s a real rush of blood to the head. 

COMPARE: Let’s talk The Crow. My dad showed me movies. When you came on, he’d go, ‘bad guy.’ (Starring lead Brandon Lee was shot when a live was accidentally entered into a chamber of a gun on the set of The Crow in 1993.) 

DPK: Brandon’s passing was a huge tragedy. He had a stunt double. We didn’t know if the film would finish. My brother was in London. I went to Stratford and found this copy of Paradise Lost in a bookstore. I managed to get it into the film. I also managed to get It Can’t Rain All the Time into the soundtrack. 

AQ: What’s the key to longevity in Hollywood? 

DPK: Just stay healthy. So many people are gone because of drugs. I’m not preaching, but you’ve got to stay fit. I love being here, but my passion is Broadway. You gotta keep breathing. 

The last question comes from a guy celebrating his birthday, so Kelly encourages all to join in singing Happy Birthday to You. Then he gives us a performance of his own. 

 

 

David Patrick Kelly

 

Join me to celebrate 2 Million Page Views

Upcoming blog posts: 3 Laws of Power posts, a recipe review, a book review and a pharma experiment writeup. Blog posts on For the Love of Horror. There’ll be a few. Also a piece on a Daytime Disco event. Booked today off just to hammer through it all. 

Still locked out of primary Facebook. Driving me up the wall. 

Recently I passed the 2 million hit mark on this blog, after running it for nearly 18 years. Took me 14 years to get the first million, and a further 4 to get the second. Must be doing something right. Anyway, I figured I’d celebrate. I’ve put up a meetup with Manchester Nightlife to do a few Northern Quarter bars, starting in Pen and Pencil. Come and join me!

I am drunk writing this.

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Polished off a 100ml bottle of Flight Club rum, a present I got a while back. Then downed a sample bottle of Chivas Regal. 

Finished Bloody Social Worker by Richard Wills, an exposé autobiography on the profession. More on that later. 

Rewatched Mulholland Drive, a David Lynch movie. Woman staggers down a Hollywood street clutching a bag of money and no recollection of anything. Meets an aspiring actress; together they go to an audition and meet the director and… nothing makes sense from therein. Very weird. Not sure there’s much to understand. As much as I like it, I’m don’t know why it’s considered a classic. 

Dear month. Car bills, mostly. Saw Akira in 4K on the big screen in Vue on Friday night. Amazing Japanese sci-fi, just wanted to see it large even though I’ve got the DVD. 15 bastard quid for a standard cinema seat. That’s more than I paid for the physical media in 2002. 

For the Love of Horror convention yesterday. Blog posts to come. Had a celeb photo booked, got another on the day. 

Went to Daytime Disco in Joshua Brooks, solo, as my sole Meetup attendee seemingly bought a ticket and backed out. Blog post on that to come also. 

Annual Leave tomorrow. Big writing day.

Law 23: Concentrate Your Forces

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‘Conserve your forces and energies by keeping them concentrated at their strongest point. You gain more from finding a rich mine and mining it deeper, than by flitting from one shallow mine to another – intensity defeats extensity every time. When looking for sources of power to elevate you, find the one key patron, the fat cow who will give you milk for a long time to come.’ 

In Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power, this later 23rd law concerns singling out a target and focussing all your energies on it – to make sacrifices in order to achieve an end goal. 

Greene’s example transports us to 6th century BC China and the Kingdom of Wu, where the king – whose name is also presumably Wu – is intent on seizing the neighbouring Middle Kingdom. Hence numerous wars occur on several fronts as land is gained but ultimately lost, and his base of operations – his palace – is eventually surrounded and lost to the barbarous southern state of Yueh. 

Moving west, and several centuries, a bloke called Tim Berners-Lee invents this here Internet through which you’re reading my blog. I’m about as far from a Chinese king as you can get. I do admin and live in a deprived mill town in North West England. 

You’ll notice on this blog I’ve been setting myself a series of monthly challenges – touchtyping, shorthand, bodybuilding, nunchuks etc. 

The reason I formalise these things is, if I don’t concentrate those forces – If I don’t cut back on everything else and channel my efforts into one goal, I just forget what I’m doing or get tied up in other non-essential things and I achieve virtually nothing. Staying focussed and not flitting between activities don’t just help me to progress on that task – getting good at anything, Teeline shorthand for example - takes hours of work. 

Alongside making the improvements and gaining the skills, that dedication can be a serious benefit to mental health. You’re less likely to have those ‘wtf am I doing with my life’ thoughts (if you’re ever prone to them) if you at least know what you’re doing with your month and your mind and actions are absorbed with that goal. 

It’s also reassuring to have another project lined up so you can not only see the end in sight for what you’re currently doing, but know that you’re not running off a mental cliff, so to speak. After bodybuilding for a month, I’ve got 6 more to do, theoretically, before the end of July. Well, that’s not going to happen. But at least I can choose which project to work on next. Probably something less physically demanding and more social. (This was written some weeks ago, and I am now ploughing through this Excess Month, keeping as busy as possible for the month. I’m certainly busy.) 

If you’re British, you probably went through the same comprehensive secondary education as I did, culminating in 2 years of GCSEs. For me, dealing with memory difficulties that my school didn’t believe in (despite 2 separate diagnoses from NHS educational psychologists), 10 GCSEs were just unrealistic. It was chaos trying to juggle the subjects, the homeworks and the different pieces of coursework, and it resulted in a lot of missed deadlines and detentions (that ironically put me further behind). 

After school I attended Tameside College and sat an intermediate and advanced GNVQs in Media. GNVQs were General National Vocational Qualifications, and the courses were laid out one project at a time, usually for a month. This allowed me to immerse myself in that one subject and develop the knowledge and practical skills in that field. It worked for me, as being able to channel those efforts into one project meant less confusion, less mental juggling and – for me – less to forget. One solid project means fewer distractions, less chance of missed appointments and less reliance on memory and less need to remind myself where I’m supposed to be, and when, and for what. I was in the same places at the same time, either college or home, doing the same work. 

In my final year, the staff introduced extra courses for more credit – an A/S level in Film Studies, a one-evening-a-week GMOCN. I took the opportunities because they were there, but they weren’t the only thing I was adding to my routine. The group started bar crawls on Thursday nights in Ashton. I got FOMO and went along to these dodgy bars, mostly playing Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now and Kernkraft 400 Zombie Nation on repeat. (The uplifting Garage hour took the edge off to be fair. Architechs’ Body Groove is still a classic.) The hangovers took it out of me, exacerbated – unbeknown to me - by an undiagnosed brain injury. To add further complication, I was listening to more music, I was attending 2 Muay Thai classes a week AND I was traversing the UCAS system with an unclear plan to go to ‘a university’ and continue studying ‘Media.’ UCAS took the entire final year to process, during which time we worked through a range of media projects focussing on areas that were quite different from the previous year, so in effect I was applying with only half the knowledge I needed to make an informed decision on my future. 

Plus I was that worn out by everything that I’d forgotten why I’d applied to a media course in the first place: I wanted to be a screenwriter. 

I apparently failed the GMOCN but I got the Merit in the GNVQ and a C in A/S Film Studies, a grade that could have been higher if I’d not got distracted by so many other things. 

I’d failed to concentrate my forces. It was challenging enough doing 2 additional courses, but if I’d have cut out the nights out, the music, the messing about in class, staved off UCAS for a year and just kept the Muay Thai as my break time, I could have established a bit more of a plan. I was forgetting a lot of stuff as I wasn’t just working on the one GNVQ course. 

Could I have got a Distinction? I doubt it at that time, but I could have absorbed a lot more knowledge and I’d have made better decisions from that point on. I wouldn’t have spent as much time hungover, cursing the bars of Ashton and their dodgy VK alcopops. 

I’d instead have deferred for a year, finished college, got more advice on memory and ruled out a theory – developed by my college – that I was dyslexic, got formally diagnosed with memory difficulties as I then did in my late 20s, and from there asked the psychology department for advice going forward from there. 

Right at the end of the GNVQ I managed to achieve 4 Distinctions – the highest possible GNVQ grade – on the Freelance Journalism project. I did that amongst all the chaos of that year. 

I can only imagine the grades I could have got in other projects if I’d have cut out the nights out, the music, the confusion. If I’d have been bold enough to decide to defer UCAS… I could be working in journalism or public relations today. I could have got this memory condition diagnosed at 19, instead of at 27. 

This is why, today, I set myself a challenge to achieve something. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be achieving this month, but I’m tapping through this Excess Month project right now, watching Conor Benn beat up Regis Prograis while I sip Flight Club spiced rum. That fits.

It’s For the Love of Horror Week

Manchester’s bi-annual horror convention For the Love of Horror takes over Bowlers Exhibition Centre this weekend for 2 days of horror movie stars, panels, photo ops, stalls and sets. I’ve got a ticket to meet T-Bird himself, The Crow’s David Patrick Kelly. FIRE IT UP! FIRE IT UP! Tickets for each day are still available. I’m there Saturday. There’s a meetup with Manc Mates if you fancy joining us and chatting movies. Look at this for a panel lineup! 

 

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Later that afternoon there’s the Daytime Disco event featuring Michael Gray, of 2004 hit The Weekend. Joshua Brooks always puts on good house music events with some impressive DJs from yesteryear. I’ve just got my ticket. 3 of us so far.

A Better Tomorrow?

Excess Month continues. 

Watched A Better Tomorrow, a Hong Kong John Woo movie about 2 brothers on opposite sides of the law. Great gunfights. Also a great 2-disc SE DVD.  

GetSocial met in Be At One on Deansgate Thursday night for a meetup. I did a little pharma experiment that night; more on that later. 

Planned to watch the Artemis II landing on Netflix but fell asleep. 

Watched the Fury v Makhmudov fight on Netflix. More on that later too. 

Expect posts every Psychology Saturday for the foreseeable. I have eaten a lot of rubbish which isn’t ideal. Alcohol has that effect on most people including myself. I’m trying instead to combat hangovers with fruit, particularly watermelon, which is know to be effective. So let’s say I cut out takeaways and chocolate from this point forward. Weight creeping up to 83.5kg. Oh dear. Not getting takeaways also means I don’t bump into local cranks and liabilities like PK who I hadn’t seen for over a decade, but unfortunately struck up a convo on Friday. Kept that short. 

Still can’t log into Facebook as their confirmation codes just result in a circle image going round and nothing happening. Infuriating.

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Disability Travel in Manchester has Improved

 

Update from Transport for Greater Manchester / Bee Network, relating to disability travel passes.

On 16th Feb, TfGM sent out this email to disability travel pas holders like me:  

Following successful trials in August and November, we’re pleased to let you know that from 1 March 2026, travel restrictions on your bus pass are set to be lifted permanently. What this means for you:  

• From 1 March 2026, you can enjoy free bus travel across Greater Manchester, and on Bee Network buses, at any time with your Transport for Greater Manchester issued bus pass. 

• This change applies to buses only. Trams and trains are not included. The annual £10 ‘Add Tram and Train’ product will still be available for those who need it, for off-peak travel only. 

• Current restrictions remain in place throughout the rest of England; Travel for free on all local buses between 9.30am and 11pm, Monday to Friday, and all day at weekends and on public holidays.  

For further information on how to use your pass and to see the full terms and conditions, please visit beenetwork.com.   

We’re excited to make travel even more accessible and convenient for our passengers.  

Great news. Fair play. 

Worth pointing out, though, that before the pandemic, the passes were always 24/7 and were across buses and trams. So they’ve taken away a privilege, handed back a part of it, then handed back another part of it, all the while acting like they’re doing you consistent favours. I’ve got memory difficulties, hence my pass, and *I* remember. Do they think people with other disabilities won’t? 

Prior to March, I could have easily foreseen a situation where I thought I could use the pass on the tram before 9:30 without paying, and found out I’m wrong. Thankfully I didn't.